Increase in migration around the world has put a focus on the role language plays in the construction of knowledge across school subjects, as attention to language can support diverse learners in subject area learning. Drawing on the notions of register and grammatical metaphor from systemic functional linguistics, this article shows how nouns are powerful resources for knowledge construction and presentation that vary in the ways they are drawn on in different disciplines for functional purposes. In addition, it shows how developmentally, children move from elaboration and expansion of the noun group toward abstraction and grammatical metaphor through nominalization. Examples from language arts, science, and history/social studies illustrate the roles nouns, noun groups, and nominalization play in constructing knowledge at different age levels and in different subject areas. Implications for pedagogy are drawn.

Self-regulated reading is an effective approach to foster reading comprehension, but many teachers are insecure about how to support strategic reading in natural classrooms. For a successful implementation of self-regulated reading into language and content area teaching discipline-specific strategy-oriented reading instruction has to be defined. This study analyzes teachers’ perspectives (N = 231) on the instruction of self-regulated reading in German language teaching, biology, and mathematics classes. The study reveals subject differences (e.g. the frequency of cognitive strategies in class), but also commonalities between subjects (e.g. the instruction of cognitive strategies and the frequency of metacognitive strategies, the activation of resource management strategies). The perspective on teachers’ discipline-specific reading instruction sheds light on content-specific as well as also cross-curricular reading instruction routines.

Giving effective instructional explanations is one of the most important teacher competences. Recent didactic literature provides, however, little insight on teacher explanations. In our previous work we developed guidelines for designing comprehensible explanations in the field of business (teacher) education, which are along general lines transferable to other subject areas and target audiences. In this article, we first compare our guidelines to the state of research in general and mathematics didactics. We then investigate their applicability to teaching operations research at university level, based on interviews with professors of the international operations research community.

This paper introduces a novel teacher training format, the “Teaching and Learning Laboratory-Seminar” (TLL-S) which was first implemented at Freie Universität Berlin in 2016. The TLL-S serves as a response to the demand for both more and better field experiences during early teacher training. There is strong evidence to assume that field experience is most effective when linked to such theory inputs perceived by trainees as relevant and embedded into reflective field experiences. Thus, the TLL-S-intiatives delineated here were designed according to a common framework defining a fixed set of consecutive steps allowing teacher trainees to first familiarize themselves with didactic theories, exploring them in a sphere of reduced complexity, and eventually reflecting their experiences. Consequently, the main objective of this paper is to trace and report the effects of the TLL-S on teacher trainees’ ‘self-efficacy’ development and perception of ‘relevance of theoretical contents for practice’ in four subject domains (i.e. didactics of English, History, Physics, and Primary Education). Preliminary results indicate that complexity reduction of the practice environment provided by the TLL-S allegedly stabilizes teacher trainees’ self-efficacy even after repeated field experiences across all subject domains. Furthermore, ‘relevance of theoretical contents for practice’ was rated higher for the TLL-S than for previous university training formats.